


Holly Does her Best

by vitaldose



Category: Fallout - Fandom, Fallout 4
Genre: Other, and junk, talkin about murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-22 12:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17663036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vitaldose/pseuds/vitaldose
Summary: She's violent, she's toony she's just a little loony and in this fic she's invading your screen....and also trying to explain to her biographer her colorful life story.





	Holly Does her Best

It’s something else, being willfully, batfully insane in the Commonwealth. 

When the whole world has gone to absolute fuck but yesterday, ha, Hancock and I took a day trip to Diamond City where we proceeded to blow McDonoughs toilet because I was sure it was haunted- Hancock knew it wasn’t, but I mean what the fuck does he care? If I say the mayors shit is haunted the mayors shit is haunted and it’s as simple as that.

It fucking is if you were wondering.

Before the bombs fell not much was different but it was easier to fake it when Raiders weren’t trying to stab you at every turn. I mean people were trying to stab me, don’t get me wrong, that was a definite thing that happened occasionally. 

“I’m sorry General, didn’t you- I mean-” the settler Holly had cornered and brought to a small room at the edge of the settlement gestured around Sanctuary “this place doesn’t look like it was exactly crime central before the war uh- mam.”

“It fucking wasn’t” she slapped the settler upside the head and handed him a carrot and a nuka cola “just shut up and listen. Anyway, as I was saying people were trying to stab me because I was a drug dealer-” 

“Not much has changed-” the settler felt another slap against the side of his head and sighed, he didn’t have much a choice. She’d done everything for them, brought the Minutemen back from the brink and saved the lives of thousands of people across the Boston Commonwealth; she also turned her old neighborhood in to a Jet factory and built a Vault where she experimented on unwilling and unknowing subjects. “Mam it’s gonna be kinda difficult to write your life story with a concussion.”

“Shit, when you’re right your right. Where did you learn to write so well anyway?”

“I grew up in a vault.”

“Cool, cool, what was I saying?”

“You’re a drug dealer?”

“Right!”

Back before the war Boston was a major metropolis and with that kind of condensed population came condensed problems. Crime, pollution, strippercide-

“Are you making that up?”

“Its really possible- you got any Daddy-O on you?”

“No, you all ready took like a bottle of Buffout this morning and bench pressed a Brahmin.”

“I’m also a drug addict”

“No shit.”

“I grew up in a completely normal, boringly middle class household. I followed my fathers footsteps and went to school to become a lawyer, sometime between the ages of 5 and 10 I developed uh, all thissss.” She made a circle with her finger around her whole face and head indicating that she’d lost her mind very early on. “It must have been genetic, there is some mentions in my family history about a great grandmother Don Quixote-ing sometime in the late 1700’s. My grandfather used to collect small sticks he thought looked like President Lincoln and even my own mother had her own little quirks, I think maybe they were worse than they were pretending you know what I mean?”

She leaned back in her chair and looked up at the florescent ceiling light she’d salvaged from some warehouse. “This morning I saw my husband floating above me wearing my wedding dress” she smiled “it doesn’t hurt being this way kid, that’s what he said.” There was silence for a while before the settler cleared his throat and brought her back. Holly looked around and blinked a few times, catching the eye of the man she'd chosen to write her life story who was less than pleased that he’d written nothing in an hour. 

“I sold my first pill at 12, I knew the law, my father was a defense lawyer and not one of those for the mob types either. He was legit. But he made the mistake of teaching it to his daughter” she grinned “I lived very comfortably very quietly and my husband my little baby boy knew nothing of the woman I was behind the freshly laundered dresses and perfect hair.”

“Did you kill anyone?”

“Then?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“Who? How many?”

“I wasn’t a serial killer or nothing if that’s what your implying”

“General-” The Settler sighed.

“A few druggies who couldn’t get enough” she replied plainly “when you cut em off, they don’t always like that. Now? I couldn’t give a shit what these people do with these drugs, this world is so far removed from what it was before but then? Buddy, I couldn’t watch people with families kill themselves; soldiers like Nate drowning in addiction because of a war we were losing? Man I just couldn’t, but you tell someone no enough times and they either get the picture or they get mad.” Her voice was dark and the playfulness of just seconds previous seemed to dissipate like paper in the rain. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

“One”

“Who?” The General leaned forward toward her biographer and cocked her head to the side.

“A raider who tried to kidnap my little sister, two days after we left the vault.”

“Heavy.”

“Yeah- So you said you were dealing drugs for most of your life, what was the correlation between your uh issues and the drugs?” He scribbled a few things down on the paper, happy that he finally had a place to start. New books and magazines weren’t exactly commonplace in the Commonwealth, but with their connections in Diamond City and to Piper he’d be able to actually get this to print; that was if The General ever finished her stories.

“I think back then and probably more so today it was just an easier way to feel different, when you feel crazy all the time, sometimes a drug that slows things down helps.” She stood up and stretched “I bet those Trappers up north in Far Harbor could be helped by some buffjet.” Holly scratched her chin and it seemed that the aloofness that plagued her had seeped back in for the moment “Maybe I can send a caravan up th- no” she stopped “-no they’d probably kill em on sight, I’ll just go.”

“Ma’am?”

“Oh right, um, drugs” she sat back down with a huff “200 years ago drugs were not commonplace, at least not like they are now. You dealt them under the table, there wasn’t a guy sitting in the middle of a shopping mall selling daddy-o, you met in dark alleys or street corner. Though that honestly wasn’t my scene I mostly sold to strung out wives and ex military.”

“Did you have a nickname?”

“A what?”

“I read once that most drug dealers and gangsters back in the day all had nicknames, like Big H or something.”

“If I did they never said it to my face” a flash of darkness rolled across her face “most were smart enough just to call me ma’am.” From the time she stepped out of the vault and in to the wastes not too many people dared cross her. She was vicious, mean and had no reservations about blowing away anyone for any reason. 

Time had held on to her just long enough to throw her in to the world she was born for.

“Noted,” he wrote a couple of lines and opened his Nuka-Cola “do you miss the world? What it was like?”

“No” she smirked.

“Could you elaborate?”

“Just for you Steve,” truth be told she had no idea what his name was, just that everyone else said that he could write and had a brain that hadn’t been turned to mush by radiation yet. “It was stuffy, formal and cruel” she leaned back, placing her elbow on the back of the chair “Everything was clean and had to stay that way unless you wanted your neighbors to whisper behind your back. We were forced to get a loan to get Codsworth just to keep up appearances, do you know what a loan is?”

“I-”  
“A loan is when a bank gives you money and you’re happy and you go out and buy something and then the bank is like haha now you have to pay us that money back, plus interest!” She dropped her head back and groaned.

“We have loans now, I mean, didn’t you just loan Sturges 100 caps at a 50% interest?”

“Oh yeah, mother fucker owes me 4.17 caps a month for three years” she shook her head and yelled out the door “STURGES! HEY STURGES! COME HERE!” In a minute or two Sturges poked his head in the door.

“You wanted to see me boss?”

“Yeah, don’t forget my 4.17 caps on the first of the month, drop it off with the doctor”

“Oh yeah, uh, of course, not a problem” he saluted and disappeared.

“Anyway, what were we talking about?” Holly yawned and took a swig of the Nuka-Cola that she’d brought for the biographer.

“The world before?”

“Yeah, I don’t miss it, though I imagine most people whose brains work like mine probably wouldn’t. There was this tension inside everyone that you met, like they were all loose canons waiting to explode. From the smallest little baby to the oldest grandma, there was a rage building in them and buddy? Buddy I could see it, they all glowed red and orange and yellow, like fire, and the only thing that was going to assuage them would be the end of the world as we knew it.” She was staring directly in to his eyes.

“They glowed, do-do we glow? The post world?” He had to speak her language if they were to get anywhere.

“In a way” she laughed “but it’s not like before, not like fire. This world is built upon the ruins of that anger and the ones like me? We still burn bright, we still scream red at the world; but the rest of you? Your colors are muted and gray, there’s no fucking life here, no future, no hope and it reflects on all of your faces.” She wasn’t looking at him anymore, he followed her view outside where in the distance a mole rat was being stomped to death by a Radstag Doe. 

“I believe you.”

“I know you do Brent” she turned back with a smile “that’s why you’re here.” She suddenly slammed her hand on the table causing the biographer to look back quickly. “Ha! Okay fuck let’s get this show on the road all ready!” she leaned back “Look I know you guys miss that world but it took us thousands and thousands of years to get to that point and what did we do? Instead of giving a shit about the future we blew it the fuck up, all those reds and oranges and yellows couldn’t hold it in anymore and they destroyed the future we worked so fucking hard to achieve.”

The biographer’s heart was still pumping from her scaring the shit out of him just seconds before so as she spoke it seemed to have more of an impact. She was impulsive, reckless and violent and he wasn’t sure if all of this was bluster or some kind of truth she’d had locked away for a while. But there was a kind of urgency to getting her story, an account of the world before through the eyes of a woman who never really belonged there; the urgency came in not knowing if she’d be dead within the day.

“I- don’t mean any disrespect but weren’t you supporting the chaos with your um illicit activities?”

“Of course I was! But it wasn’t the chaos that was driving people up the wall, it was the stillness. Your neighbors smiled but their eyes were empty, their teeth were white but they smoked like chimney’s! Everybody was perpetuating this horseshit life knowing what was underneath! I mean Jesus Christ, everything that happened could have been avoided had we not been laying among the dead all-fucking-ready!” Holly was standing now and screaming but The Biographer simply kept writing. “Like those fucking Cabots.”

“The Cabots?”

“Dumb immortals who got their science from aliens.”

“Ali- ma’am?”

“See this is the part I’m definitely telling the truth about- anyway we can write a whole book about their goofy shit later” she sat back down with another huff.

“When the bombs fell all we had time to take was that shit brained son of mine, RIP, and the clothes on our backs. We got to the vault and were told we were going in to decontamination, but if you know anything about vault tec-”

“I do.”

“You know those vaults are mostly all gross science experiments and mine was no fucking exception. I went back a little while ago and all of the vault is just cryo pods, in damn near every room. There were a few sleeping areas for minimal staff so I imagine they had high hopes for when they opened the doors. Eventually all the systems went offline except for the ones that asshole dumb fuck of a son of mine, RIP, kept going.”

“Don’t you run the institute now?”

“Well yeah, but that was his mistake, he trusted me until his last breath and now I run that place the way it was supposed to be run.” He didn’t actually know what went on in there and only a few choice people were allowed to teleport in and out. “It’s still a god damn mecca I promise, place is so clean it squeaks.” 

Holly hated the Institute, but not as much as she hated the Brotherhood of Steel; she hoped her final act of defiance was the last thing that went through Maxson’s mind- well that and her brass knuckles. Her only regret was that in order to get to where she is she had to slaughter the Railroad. Covered in blood she apologized with every bullet that killed instantly; she had a plan and if she was going to save every synth whether they wanted to be saved or not the Railroad had to be destroyed.

As if reading her mind The Biographer asked “Do you have any regrets about what happened to the Railroad?”

“Of course, I tried to explain to Desdemona that my choices were limited, but she refused to listen and accused me of being a traitor. I gave her the option to help her people but she wasn’t having none of it.”

“So you killed her?”

“I had to, Desdemona wanted to blow up the Institute instead of working with me, she didn’t believe that their sins could be erased. There would still be Synths in the facilities when it happened and many non aware synths would be programmed to attack us on sight.”

“So you traded their lives for the deaths of a hundred humans?”

“I traded the deaths of a hundred humans for the lives a thousand synths, my motives were clear and though I regret the action I do not regret the results.”

There was a tinge of normalcy in her voice when she spoke about genocide and he remembered finding a plaque in her home congratulating her on her graduation from law school. “In your quest to liberate the Synths you left a blood trail the size of the Charles River and found yourself the enemy of so many people. What is it about the Synths plight that made you justify that much death and destruction?”

“You sound just like Piper.”

“Thank you” he smiled.

“And yes, look how would you feel if you were captive to the people that made you? What if your parents told you that you that, for one, you are not allowed to feel and that you aren’t even supposed to have emotions? Then they forced you to clean the floor for hours?” She turned her head again and raised her eyebrow “I don’t pretend to be a crusader of morality, but someone like myself can see that slavery is wrong.”

“But the Railroad-”

“COULD NOT SEE THE VISION” she exclaimed. It seems as if the biographer had touched a nerve; he inched back in his seat shrinking away from her glaring eyes. “Desdemona wanted me to destroy the only hope we have in bringing this world back! Shaun was dying anyway and instead of thinking straight she went immediately to scorched fucking earth! So what if they’d built a nuclear reactor? Haven’t you shot a fat man off the top of a building just to see where it lands?” He slowly shook his head “Nevermind! It doesn’t matter! What I’m saying is the Railroad didn’t think far enough. The synths in my institute are free to think! Free to feel! Free to move about the fucking cabin! Desdemona refused to listen and she paid the price.” She inhaled deeply and shuddered and she exhaled, but it seemed to calm her down “Listen, your job is just to write what I say okay, I understand you need to ask some questions in order to write anything, but buddy? You need to be a little more careful with the words you choose.”

“Sure, o-of course, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be nervous Neville, just- I all ready explained to you why I had to do what I had to do there wasn’t much more explanation needed. I did what I had to do, it’s really as simple as that. Now let’s leave it at that for today okay? I’m kinda tired and my brain feels like mirelurk guts so I’m gonna go take a nap nap and we’ll pick this up tomorrow okay?”

She stood up and walked out the door without another word, grabbing what looked like a hammer from an arcade game that she’d chained a couple saw blades too.


End file.
